Under Obama, racial hope, no change

Six years ago, Barack Obama’s election was going to usher in a new era of racial understanding.

That hasn’t happened. Few, if any, anticipated that the man whose election itself was historic would be in a constant lose-lose situation as president when it came to race.

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The protests and violence in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police shooting of Michael Brown have crystallized a larger sense within the African-American community, and civil rights leaders say they feel they’re a long way from Grant Park and a lot closer to “here we go again” on the Trayvon Martin shooting.

“Things got somewhat better because the country felt proud of itself for electing him. But I certainly think they’re worse than they were on Jan. 20, 2009,” said National Urban League President Marc Morial. “There was a sense that the country had turned the corner. I think today there may be a sense that that progress has been a proverbial step forward and two steps back.”

The economic divide, accentuated by the recession, has only widened the racial divide — the number of African-Americans who lost their own houses during the mortgage crisis, among other factors, appears to have done more to shape where race relations stand than having the first African-American in the White House. In 1950, the workforce participation among young black men was 65.2 percent. In 2012, it was 35.7 percent.

That’s not helped by many neighborhoods — Ferguson included — remaining either white or black, with little interaction between them.

“There are so many communities where you still have persistent patterns of segregation,” said Tom Perez, the Labor secretary and the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “It leads to a lack of understanding, and that is unfortunate, and that can have ill consequences.”

African-American and civil rights leaders say this tension has been heightened by conservatives’ opposition to Obama that they believe has been waged on racial grounds, along with measures like voter ID laws they say are meant to keep minorities from the polls.

No one expected Obama to change 400 years of legacy in a term and a half as president. But Obama took a very cautious approach in his first term, largely avoiding the topic, leading black leaders to complain that they were watching their gains erode under a president who took their support for granted. The outrage that caught the White House by surprise after he said police “acted stupidly” in Henry Louis Gates’ 2009 arrest only helped solidify the West Wing’s hands-off approach.

“He wanted to be perceived in a color-blind way, but the way he went about that was giving short shrift to African-Americans so that he wouldn’t be perceived as hung up on race,” said Paul Butler, a former DOJ prosecutor who’s now a professor at Georgetown Law. “One of the problems for people who don’t want to be perceived as hung up on race is that they end up obsessed with it.”

“These are flashpoints,” said Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen, discussing the recent incidents and the violence they’ve sparked. “The country is very, very fragile along the fault line of race.”

An Associated Press poll right before Obama’s reelection indicated racial prejudice had ticked up during his first term, showing that 51 percent of Americans expressed anti-black sentiments, compared with 48 percent in 2008, and 56 percent demonstrated implicit anti-black sentiments, compared with 49 percent four years earlier.

That sense appears to have been heightened in recent weeks with a string of high-profile deaths of minority men at the hands of police: Eric Garner in New York, Ezell Ford in Los Angeles, and another man in St. Louis on Tuesday afternoon. Saturday, Brown’s parents were in New York for a major march protesting Garner’s choking — an incident that’s consumed passions there for weeks, albeit without the violence that erupted in Ferguson.

“There are probably more Fergusons out there. They just haven’t been sparked by this kind of incident yet,” said John Brittain, a civil rights lawyer and friend of Attorney General Eric Holder — who on his visit to Ferguson on Wednesday discussed his own history of race-motivated run-ins with the police, saying, “I understand that mistrust.”